Over the last decade, the number of Internet users has increased exponentially. Students and various types of professionals constantly browse and search for information on the Internet and often rely heavily on it as a primary reference tool. In addition, the Internet has become a unique resource for home shopping, commercial transactions, and entertainment. Users can spend hours and hours on the Internet, and with most Internet browser applications, temporary files can be maintained for each page the user visits. As a result, hundreds if not thousands of temporary files can be generated and stored on the user's network or machine. Management of this great amount of data, including retrieval of any of the stored temporary files, can be challenging, cumbersome, and problematic regardless of where they are stored.
Conventional archival systems currently exist for the main purpose of maintaining a historical record of Internet use. These systems allow caching of the user's web pages based on dates (archive dates). Archive dates are selected times when the page was saved. Unfortunately, archive dates are limited for any particular page since the page may only be saved to the server a maximum number of times (e.g., 4 archival dates per site) or for a limited amount of time. To access a saved page, the conventional systems require the user to search by page and then by archive date. This can be a rather exhausting and overwhelming endeavor for most Internet users. Hence, such archival systems tend to be rather unhelpful to the majority of Internet users. Consequently, users essentially lack the ability to take advantage of all their stored information.